How to Play

How to Play

A West Marches campaign is more flexible than a traditional campaign, but it also requires some self-direction from the players. Players have to be engaged and interested for the campaign to be a success, and they must be willing to participate in setting up game sessions and recording their adventures. The rules on this page are intended to make it easy to contribute and keep the amount of extra work to a minimum.

Important Tools

A key part of a West Marches game is good communication and organization. Each session will be summarized and recorded for the others to read. Discoveries will be added to the map so that others can investigate or respond. We will be using two primary sites to facilitate communication and coordination between the players.

Discord: Voice and Text Chat

Discord is the voice chat application we will use to play the game. You will need reliable access to this app or you won’t be able to play, on account of not hearing anything anyone says.

Roll20.net: Battle maps and other set pieces

Roll20 is the site we will use for region maps, battle maps, and game audio. You can play without it, but it is strongly recommended you create a free account. Otherwise someone else will have to maneuver your token in combat.

WorldAnvil: The Adventure Log and Encyclopedia

This website will be used to keep records of NPCs, Locations, open quests, as well as summaries of each session played. As more is uncovered during play, the entries for each item will become more complete. This is meant to be the repository of all player knowledge about the setting. The DM will not correct any errors or contribute more information to these entries, they are the product of player discovery.

You will be make your own free account, which will then be granted access to the site.

Rules of Record Keeping

Because players aren’t going to be present for all sessions, a West Marches campaign has a record keeping component. Think of it like the adventurers returning to the tavern to share their exploits with their fellows. If you play in a session, you may be asked to help with record keeping for that session. There are a few different things you may want to keep track of. More information on how to add record entries can be found here.

• The Adventure Log – A brief summary of the session played. You want it to be detailed enough for those who were not there to understand the basics of what happened. You can write it from your character’s perspective or simply as a real-world summary. Don’t worry too much about going into blow-by-blow descriptions or dramatic re-tellings unless that is appealing to you. A bullet point list would work fine too.
• NPC Updates – Any new NPCs of note can be added, and existing entries can be updated to reflect any new discoveries. These do not need to be detailed or pretty. It’s just a record of what the players know about the NPC so far.
• PC Updates – Each player can update their own character pages if anything significant changes. PC pages can be as brief or as long as you like.
• Quest Updates – If progress towards a larger quest has been accomplished then the entry for that quest can be updated briefly.
• Adventure Hooks – This is how you let players know about interesting things they may want to look into in their own session.

Campaign Rules

RPG System – GURPS

We will be using GURPS 4th Edition. All official source books are permitted. No homebrew or 3rd party resources, however. There are 200 official books and articles. You’ll be fine.

Player Characters

While individual exceptions may be considered, these rules will govern all player characters joining the campaign. For information on the character creation process, see the page for Character Creation.

• Players may have up to three active characters in each Faction. (For this purpose, each World counts as having its own Local faction.) You can retire a character at any time, and you can replace dead or retired characters immediately.
• All player characters will start at the same level and each character will level up independently. Some character attributes will be restricted based on their place of origin. For details see the page on Character Creation.
• Characters have their own inventory, and may only share items in ways that make sense in world. If you want to keep things somewhere besides your backpack, you’ll need to make appropriate accommodations.

Game Mechanics

• There are no minimum or maximum number of sessions you must join, but you will be expected to be relatively proactive in reading up on the relevant quest info before playing a session (the recruiting player should identify these). There won’t be much in the way of pre-session recaps.
• You are entirely free to get in over your head. Scout and plan accordingly.
• Death will mean different things based on where and how it occurs, but it will not be mitigated. Resurrection will only be possible in specific rare circumstances, and it will be possible to lose a character forever.
• Because of the scope of the campaign and the West Marches format, there will be times where game balance and game mechanics will place limitations on things in ways that might not be considered “realistic”. This will be kept to a minimum.
• Player knowledge vs character knowledge vs faction knowledge will likely become a huge mess. Do your best. We won’t fuss about it too much. There will be a game mechanic that allows for inexplicable knowledge leaking between characters.
• Generally speaking, characters will be allowed to use magic in sci-fi settings and laser pistols in magic settings. That said, some worlds and locations will have differences in their local natural laws that limit what can and can’t be done.